Free Alis by Naomi Rich

you to go back to Freeborne and marry that man, either.”
    She felt the blood come up in her cheeks. Suddenly, with an extra loud snore, Judith opened her eyes, and Luke and Alis started away from each other. The old woman looked suspiciously at them and eased herself up out of her chair. It was time they were in their beds.
    Judith was already asleep when Alis blew out the candle. She was not troubled by Ethan’s refusal. There was time enough. Fever always lasted for weeks and weeks.

7
    M aster Robert was there, Thomas, and another of the Elders, a fair-haired woman with the long-nosed features of a shrew. They faced Elizabeth across the room that looked out onto the square. This time the Minister was there, too, leaning on a stick, his gentle old face troubled.
    “My dear Robert, surely you can wait a little? His back is not fully healed, my wife tells me; he hardly speaks. And we must not give up hope that he will return to faith and be one of us again. How can that be, if we send him away?”
    Alis remembered the Senior Elder from the day of the punishment. It was his thin voice that had pronounced sentence, his stiff face that had watched impassively as the flesh was flayed: it was fruitless to expect pity from him. His dry, rasping tone grated on the ear.
    “Indeed, Minister, we must always hope for repentance, but the man was not chastened by admonition. Neither, it seems, has punishment effected any change in him. Mistress Elizabeth would doubtless have told us if words of penitence had fallen from his lips.”
    He paused but Elizabeth did not speak. He turned toward Alis, who had been standing by the door, expecting any moment to be dismissed from the room. He looked at her coldly. “Alis, is it not?” He did not wait for her answer. “You have been tending the man. Have you heard him express contrition for his ways? If so, speak.”
    For a moment her voice would not come. Then she cleared her throat and said a little huskily, “No, Master Robert. He has said nothing.”
    She was trembling. He turned away again. The Minister looked at him out of faded blue eyes.
    “We must give him more time, Robert. I will strive with him. Let us not despair of his soul lightly. Besides, he has barely recovered. He is not to be harried.”
    The other man’s thin face did not change. “We have been patient, have we not? None has troubled him while he has lain in your house these many weeks.”
    Elizabeth moved abruptly. “Does not the Book say, Like years under the sun are the days of the Maker while he waits for the sinner
    to turn ? If the Maker can wait for years, surely you can manage a few more weeks.”
    Robert made no sign that he heard her but addressed the Minister again. “It is an ill thing for the man to remain in the Community, Minister. It will seem that we repent of our rigor.” He paused. “Which we do not.”
    The Minister turned to the shrew-faced woman. “Mistress Rebecca, assist me to persuade our Senior Elder. Master Robert is rightly for discipline, but a little gentleness, too, will surely serve our ends as well or better. You have children. This man is some woman’s son, too.”
    “And it is because I have children that I will not countenance his presence among us any longer.” Her voice was loud and hard, at odds with the weak face. “Shall we let unbelief, like a fever, infect our young? Let him be cast out, as we have agreed.”
    The Minister looked startled. “Agreed? It has not been agreed. You have come to discuss it, have you not?”
    Robert gave the woman a sharp look. “The Elders have spoken together, Minister, and we are of one mind. The man must go.”
    The old man had been leaning heavily on his stick, but now he straightened up, and the benevolence was gone from his voice.
    “Since when did the Elders meet without the Minister to settle so grave a matter?”
    “Forgive us, Minister.” There was no courtesy in the formal words.
    “Your views are known. They were